Christmas campaigns: 5 festive online contest ideas

Christmas is the most profitable time of the year for nearly all businesses, but particularly those in retail and eCommerce. More money moves through more accounts at Christmas than at any other time of year. In nearly all cases, whatever product or service you’re selling, to not launch significant campaigns at Christmas is just bonkers: it would be like not watering a houseplant during a heatwave.

Now, I hear what you’re saying: everyone goes big at Christmas, and every other business goes big on their marketing. Surely even if I do nothing, the people would still come because there’s so much traffic to go around?

Sadly not. The bricks and mortar retail game isn’t the rampaging colossus it was during its heyday of the 70s and 80s, and in eCommerce if your marketing doesn’t show up, as far as potential new customers are concerned, you’re simply not there. Add to that how hyper-connected and clued up your modern customer is, and how many of your competitors are sending offers X, Y, and Z into your target customers’ emails, and implementing all sorts of new and creative promotional ideas, and you realise you’re operating in a digital wild west.

You need to stand out. You need your marketing campaigns to be innovative. Attention grabbing. Undeniable. And this is never more important than during the festive season. Even Santa and his merry band of elves would be intimidated if they saw the Colosseum of capitalism they were being asked to compete in today. So what’s the answer?

Online contests: everyone’s a winner

There are going to be deals and discounts and promotional prizes through the festive season. There always is. However, instead of following the herd, think about standing out by creating and incorporating online contests into your marketing campaigns.

Creating online contests and promoting those to your followers and target users through your social media, and integrating them into your email newsletters and landing pages could be the solution to saving your Christmas budget, and standing head and shoulders above the competition this festive season.

Christmas contest ideas

Online contests and prize giveaways work by enticing people to enter by offering exciting prizes, either high ticket items like the latest tech products or premium experience packages, or flash prizes like promotional codes or partner discounts. By offering people the chance to win prizes, they can be encouraged to enter your contest, engage with your content, engage with your promotional messaging, and be educated about your brand and your products.

By promoting your contest across the various social media platforms, such as LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc., you can reach a wide array of users, and use the interaction to encourage traffic to your strategic website pages, encourage users to opt-in to your email newsletter, recommend and promote products, and even incentivise sales on promoted products by distributing discount codes.

In this article we’ll run through some of the possible online contest ideas that can help make your holiday season campaigns stand out, and put you above the competition.

The Advent Calendar for maximum engagement

Really, the Christmas campaign go-to idea for an online contest is the Advent Calendar format. Why? Because what’s better than an online contest? Multiple online contests, with chances for people to win prizes or play games on every single day of your campaign.

The Advent Calendar uses the same game engine as our Dynamic Path™ format, which essentially allows you to create multiple levels or steps to an experience, and use every game engine in the Drimify catalogue to comprise the levels. How you allow access to new levels could be done by unlocking them in a traditional linear fashion, but by adopting the traditional advent calendar approach, you can unlock them by date.

For example, say you chose to have a full 24-day Advent Calendar experience, with a combination of fun games and different types of online contests every day. You could have each level unlocked on its day, so a game can be played on December 1, then December 2 an instant win game is released, then on December 3, there’s a Quiz, and so on and so forth. While you don’t have to deliver a 24 day experience, using this format to engage with customers repeatedly allows you to more thoroughly tell your brand story, and maximises your chances building customer relationships and delivering on your marketing objectives.

An instant win competition for maximum participation

An instant win contest could take the form of a Spin the Wheel game, a Scratch Card, or a Wheel of Fortune, among others available on the Drimify games creation platform. The beauty of this kind of contest, particularly in the run up to Christmas when everyone is super busy, is that everyone knows how to play.

Whether you’re just running your cursor over the screen to scratch your Scratch Card, or pushing a button to spin the wheel of play Wheel of Fortune, it’s easy to create and it’s even easier to play. These games work great as part of a broader campaign to get people excited about potentially winning a prize, and because they’re highly visual, they deliver a level of anticipation into proceedings.

This instant win style of contest is a great way to deliver flash prizes as a day (or even days) in an Advent Calendar gamification campaign.

A branded Quiz to test and challenge your audience

This could be considered a meritocratic contest, in that some entrants will perform better than others, and you could even include a leaderboard at the end. The Quiz game engine on Drimify allows you to pose a series of answers and questions, and invite entrants to respond by multiple choice, or even ordered, or open answers.

You could set this up as a contest in a number of ways, either by having a top 10 entered into a prize draw or invited to take part in an instant win game afterwards, or purely by having the winner with the highest score receiving the grand prize. In the latter case, it’s important to set out contingencies in your contest rules in the case of a tie, or multiple ties, as you could end up owing more prizes than you have to give. For this reason, we would always recommend entering top performers into an instant win competition.

In terms of content, the Quiz is a great way to educate people about your brand through interactive pop-ups at set intervals through the questions, which can also include video and photo content for extra engagement.

A Photo Contest to capitalise on people’s appetites for social interaction

The Photo Contest game engine on Drimify allows you to invite users to submit photos according to criteria you set out. By running it through your Drimify account, you can customise its appearance, easily integrate it across social media and messaging platforms like Facebook and WhatsApp, embed it in your email newsletters, as well as on your websites and blogs. This means all the organisation is kept in one place, and you only need to concern yourself with the themes and proprietary terms of the different social media platforms when you’re promoting your game. You can also approve a shortlist of photos, so you don’t need to worry about pictures that are inappropriate going around social media channels with your branded hashtags.

This sort of contest appeals to a lot of people, and is a great way to tap into people’s love of taking photos and sharing them. Winning a Photo contest, or even being shortlisted for one, also brings with it some social cache. Around Christmas time, this sort of contest idea really comes into its own, as everyone and every business will be more decorated and dressed up than at any other time, so visually, people who enter your competition will have a lot more to work with in terms of their environment.

The Photo Contest, as you can imagine, will allow you to gather a lot of user generated content (UGC), which, provided you plan ahead with your contest criteria, could yield really useful promotional material for future campaigns. You can also use submitted entries that will be shortlisted to further promote your game during its duration, and inspire more people to enter.

A Video Contest to bring out your audience’s creativity

The Video Contest is exactly the same as the Photo Contest but with videos. Given that every smartphone these days has HD cameras and onboard editing software, you can really ask entrants to get creative and give quite specific briefs with Video contest ideas. This is another one where there is great social cache for being creative and clever, and having that recognised among your peers.

Both types of media contests can also be connected to a Voting Gallery, where you can invite users to re-engage once more to vote for a winner (or winners) that you approve. You could include a media contest at the start of an Advent Calendar experience, and keep promoting it throughout the week by sharing shortlisted entries across social media, and then release the Voting Gallery towards the end of the campaign for that contest’s winner to be found.

For quick and professional contest creation, top brands trust Drimify to bring their contest ideas to life for a reason

To create more sophisticated online contests, and bring to life more nuanced competition ideas, that are easier to manage and integrate across platforms – not to mention simple to create, even with no coding experience, Drimify is the games creation platform to be on.

Online contests are an innovative, attention grabbing form of content that give brands a real opportunity to create a relationship with customers, particularly over the holiday season when they’re more interested in discovering new brands and businesses, with eyes on presents and their own Christmas lists alike.

Head over to the Drimify website, create a free account, and start playing with the game engines to see what’s possible.

Want to know more?